World Wide Web creator leads W3C effort to build online payment standards, including Bitcoin

According to bitcoinmagazine, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has begun reviewing the draft charter of the Web Payment Working Group. The Web Payment Working Group will be launched on September 15 after the review is completed, and will begin work on a comprehensive web payment architecture and prepare for key topics for the next Technical Plenary/Advisory Committee meeting (TPAC 2015) in October.

The World Wide Web Consortium, led by Tim Berners-Lee Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is the most authoritative and influential international neutral technical standards body in the field of Web technology. The Internet Payment Interest Group will serve as the overall coordinator of the World Wide Web Consortium's mission for Internet payments.

"The Web Payments Working Group is not creating any new digital payment solutions, but rather integrating existing and emerging solutions into Web applications more efficiently and securely," the W3C announcement said. "Standardized message flows should make automated payments easier to implement, which will improve Web payments and overall security and user experience."

The Web Payments Interest Group also recently updated their Web Payments Use Cases 1.0 Working Draft and published a FAQ providing more information on the benefits of the future standard.

The W3C Web Payments document also mentions Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but only as a possible option along with other payment methods such as Google Wallet, Apple Pay, PayPal and iDEAL. The draft use case briefly mentions Bitcoin and Ripple as two cryptocurrency payment methods, outlining a scenario for an ideal payment experience using Bitcoin, or a similar cryptocurrency.

Internet pioneers such as Ted Nelson Nelson, Marc Marc Andreessen , and Berners-Lee himself believed that the Internet should have a built-in framework for micropayments. Berners-Lee wanted to build micropayments into the Web protocol, but this idea has never been implemented.

"In the late 1990s, Berners-Lee tried, through the W3C, to develop a micropayments system for the Web," Walter Isaacson wrote in his 2014 book, The Innovators: How Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. The idea was to design a way to embed it into the Web that would allow banks or businesses to create different electronic wallet services. "But it never came to fruition, in part because of the ever-changing complexity of banking regulations," Isaacson noted.

The early work of the Web Payments Interest Group, and the upcoming work of the Web Payments Working Group, can be seen as an incremental step toward realizing Berners-Lee’s vision. Surprisingly, however, official W3C documents only mention Bitcoin in passing.

Isaacson reports that Andreessen mentioned that Bitcoin is a good model for standard internet payment systems. “If I had a time machine and could go back to 1993, one thing I would definitely do is build on Bitcoin or some form of cryptocurrency,” Andreessen said.

One possible explanation for the W3C’s conservative approach is that they want to distance themselves from controversial aspects of Bitcoin, including its semi-anonymous transactions, and wait for a “cleaned” version of Bitcoin.

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